I remember a while back working with a client who wanted to set up an email server capable of sending two million emails a month, starting from scratch. While this might sound like a case of mass spamming, it was a legitimate inquiry from someone who had come up with a pretty smart way to leverage one of the most significant events on the global sporting calendar but had no idea of the intricacies of email marketing.
Sure, we can build a server capable of sending two million emails a day, let alone a month. That’s not the tricky bit. All it calls for really is a decent-sized server, some extra IP’s and email sending software.
The tricky bit is getting any of those two million emails anywhere near your email inbox, let alone in it. Start from scratch, and you’ll be lucky if your emails end up in the spam folders.
Sending is entirely different from actually inboxing. Unless you’re an email service provider, nobody makes money from the number of emails they send. Your money comes from inboxing.
Getting into a client’s email inbox is as close to having the keys to the kingdom as you need to be, and after inboxing several hundred million emails for clients from all verticals, here’s our concise email deliverability guide for 2021.
Email Sending Infrastructure
Regardless of what you use to send your emails, you need to have all the elements in place to develop a strong sender reputation. Things like SPF (Sender Policy Framework), DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), and DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication) all serve to authenticate you as a sender and ensure your messages hit the inbox. Always make sure to add a bounce server to handle hard bounces.
Make sure your emails have a clear unsubscribe link and identify who you are. If someone wants to unsubscribe from your mailing list, honor the request.
Email List Health
First of all, we’re not talking spam here. Your lists should be strictly double opt-in, but even so, the health of your lists is vital. Imagine you have five thousand contacts on a mailing list, one thousand of whom haven’t opened a message from you since the days of the Pony Express. That’s an automatic drop in engagement of twenty-percent.
Besides the extra costs of sending, you’re telling the ISPs that twenty-percent of your contacts can’t be bothered even to open your emails. That’s your engagement metric shot right there.
Clean your lists out. Please take all the serial non-openers off your main lists and put them into a secondary list for very infrequent communications. If one of these does open one of your emails, put them back on the main list.
Warm Up Your Sending IPs
Want to know the easiest way to send two million emails a month with a high inboxing rate? Start by sending fifty emails. The only way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time, and the only way to warm up your sending IPs and reputation is by starting small. Start by sending fifty emails the first day, a hundred the next, then two hundred the day after that.
Do that for a couple of weeks, and you’ll soon be past the million emails a day mark and with a pretty good sender reputation to boot!
Need some help with your email marketing? Drop us a line, and we’ll soon have you up and sending!
